Consonants

Ssshhh!

The 'hard' sounds of English

Now that you know what a phoneme actually is, we can look at the
first main category: consonants. Consonants are the hard
sounds of English. If we only have the consonants in a phrase
we can still understand the phrase because the consonant sounds
carry the most meaning.
For example, try to understand this:

r y cmng t th prty?

If we put the other letters back, we get: Are you coming to
the party?

When you produce a sound by completely or partially blocking the
air flow, you produce a consonant. For example, if you block
and then release air through pressing your lips together, you will
produce the sound /p/. Leave your lips open and you simply make
an 'ee' sound, if you make any sound at all.

In English, 21 letters of the alphabet represent consonants: B, C, D,
F, G, H, J, K, L, M, N, P, Q, R, S, T, V, X, Z, and usually W and Y.
However, English spelling is not a good guide to English
pronunciation and there are, in fact, 24 consonant sounds. If
you take the short
course in transcribing sounds on this site, you will discover
what they all are. For now, we need to look at two ways to
pronounce consonants.

You can
hear the different sounds of the 's' and the 'z' but notice that
your tongue stays in the same place for both sounds. The only
difference is that with zoo you add your
voice and with sue, you don't.
The words are minimal pairs in English, distinguished by voicing
alone.

There are some pairs of voiced and unvoiced consonants in
English in this list. Can you identify which ones are voiced
and which ones are unvoiced? Try the hand-on-throat trick.
Click on the table when you have your answer.

In English, whether a sound is voiced or unvoiced is very
important because, as you can see, the act of adding voice to a
consonant makes it change its significance. Voicing and not
voicing are phonemic differences in English but not so in many other
languages.

Be aware that letters and sounds are not the same thing.
For example, in the word letting in English there are only
three consonant sounds (l, tt and ng) although
there are five consonant letters (l, t, t, n and
g).

Here is a list of all the consonant sounds in English with their
transcription: